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How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology - and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning, or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle?

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues - from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness, and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

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The first chapter of Tegmark’s new book is called “Welcome to the most important conversation of our time,” and that’s exactly what this book is. Before diving into the book, a few words about why this conversation is so important and why Tegmark is a central agent helping make it happen and, through the book, the perfect guide.

Have you notice how you don’t “solve” CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) anymore? That’s because computers now can. Artificial Intelligence, from being a fairly niche area of mostly academic study a decade ago has exploded in the last five years. Much more quickly than many anticipated, machine learning (a subset of AI) systems have defeated the best human Go players, are piloting self-driving cars, usefully if imperfectly translating documents, labeling your photos, understanding your speech, and so on. This has led to huge investment in AI by companies and governments, with every sign that progress will continue. This book is about what happens if and when it does.

But why hear about it from Tegmark, an accomplished MIT physicists and cosmologist, rather than (say) an AI researcher? First, Tegmark has over the past few years *become* an AI researcher, with 5 published technical papers in the past two years. But he’s also got a lifetime of experience thinking carefully, rigorously, generally (and entertainingly to boot) about the “big picture” of what is possible, and what is not, over long timescales and cosmic distances (see his last book!) – which most AI researchers do not. Finally, he's played an active and very key role (as you can read about in the book’s epilogue) in actually creating conversation and research about the impacts and safety of AI in the long-term. I don’t think anyone is more comprehensively aware of the full spectrum of important aspects of the issue.

So now the book. Chapter 1 lays out why AI is suddenly on everyone’s radar, and very likely to be extremely important over the coming decades, situating present-day as a crucial point within the wider sweep of human and evolutionary history on Earth. Chapter 2 takes the question of “what is intelligence?” and abstracts it from its customary human application, to “what is intelligence *in general*?” How can we define it in a useful way to cover both biological and artificial forms, and how do these tie to a basic understanding of the physical world? This lays the groundwork for the question of what happens as artificial intelligences grow ever more powerful. Chapter 3 addresses this question in the near future: what happens as more and more human jobs can be done by AIs? What about AI weapons replacing human-directed ones? How will be cope when more and more decision are made by AIs what may be flawed or biased? This is a about a lot of important changes occurring *right now* to which society is, for the most part, asleep at the wheel. Chapter 4 gets into what is exciting – and terrifying – about AI: as a designed intelligence, it can in principle *re*design itself to get better and better, potentially on a relatively short timescale. This raises a lot of rich, important, and extremely difficult questions that not that many people have thought through carefully (another in-print example is the excellent book by Bostrom). Chapter 5 discusses where what happens to humans as a species after an “intelligence explosion” takes place. Here Tegmark is making a call to start thinking about where we want to be, as we may end up somewhere sooner than we think, and some of the possibilities are pretty awful. Chapter 6 exhibits Tegmark’s unique talent for tackling the big questions, looking at the *ultimate* limits and promise of intelligent life in the universe, and how stupefyingly high the stakes might be fore getting the next few decades right. It’s both a sobering and an exhilerating prospect. Chapters 7 and 8 then dig into some of the deep and interesting questions about AI: what does it mean for a machine to have “goals”? What are our goals as individuals and a society, and how can we best aim toward them in the long term? Can a machine we design have consciousness? What is the long-term future of consciousness? Is there a danger of relapsing into a universe *without* consciousness if we aren’t careful? Finally, an epilogue describes Tegmark’s own experience – which I’ve had the privilege to personally witness – as a key player in an effort to focus thought and effort on AI and its long-term implications, of which writing this book is a part. (And I should also mention the prologue, which gives an fictional but less *science*fictional depiction of an artificial superintelligence being used by a small group to seize control of human society.

The book is written in a very lively and engaging style. The explanations are clear, and Tegmark develops a lot of material at a level that is understandable to a general audience, but rigorous enough to give readers a real understanding of the issues relevant to thinking about the future impact of AI. There are a lot of news ideas in the book, and although it is sometimes written in a breezy and engaging style, that belies a lot of careful thinking about the issues.

It’s possible that real, general artificial intelligence (AGI) is 100 or more years away, a problem for the next generation, with large but manageable effects of “narrow” AI to deal with over a span of decades. But it’s also quite possible that it’s going to happen 10, 15, 20, or 30 years from now, in which case society is going to have to make a lot of very wise and very important (literally of cosmic import) decisions very quickly. It’s important to start the conversation now, and there’s no better way.

Profound. It’s the only word I can come up with to describe this book. It should be required reading for everyone on the planet.

If you’re a curious reader, it is an excellent primer on where the scientists are now. Tegmark covers the spectrum of physics, cosmology, and artificial intelligence with the clarity and enthusiasm I haven’t witnessed since we were all glued to our televisions in the 1980s watching Carl Sagan unwrap the mysteries of the cosmos. Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT, is brilliant, creative, and rational, giving him that rare ability to explain the complex and mind-boggling to the rest of us.

The primary purpose of the book, in Tegmark’s words, is to invite all of us to participate in setting goals for the development of artificial intelligence and, indeed, the future of scientific inquiry. It is rare that someone of Tegmark’s standing in the scientific community invites us into the tent and as I read the book I felt an overwhelming sense of obligation to oblige the request. This book, I think, is that important.

Philosopher Karl Popper popularized the adage, “If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not scientific.” It is a perspective widely accepted in the scientific community and in popular culture and it has driven a seemingly irreconcilable intellectual wedge between science and philosophy. It is a wedge that has damaged, and will ultimately constrain, both pursuits.

Tegmark makes an impassioned and well argued rejection of the scientific dismissal of consciousness. It is, he argues, the elephant in the room of AI. It must be addressed and understood. And I think he’s right. (He also seems optimistic that science will one day figure it out. Of that I am not so confidant, but I am certainly open to trying.)

As Tegmark clearly notes, there is no consensus in the AI community as to when, if ever, an intelligent machine capable of both learning and improving it’s own physical structure and performance, his definition of Life 3.0, will be created. Once it comes into existence, however, he makes a very convincing case that it will be too late to start thinking about aligning the machine’s goals with our own. The horse, by definition, will be out of the barn. And there is no reason to believe the outcome will be a good one if we don’t plan for it.

If you enjoy incredible facts, Tegmark provides plenty of them. I know he certainly helped me to gain a better appreciation for the sheer magnitude of the universe and the mathematical splendor of time and space.

I started this book with some skepticism. Because language itself is a human convention that we invented, I am naturally skeptical of any written or oral explanation of anything that claims to be final and complete. I think of knowledge in the way that post-Impressionist painter, George Seurat, thought of art. He established the Pointillist school, wherein the artist uses dots of pigment instead of brush strokes to create his or her artistic rendering of reality. When complete the image is obvious. Randomly remove half or more of the dots of pigment, however, and you’re forced to speculate.

And that’s precisely where we are, I believe, in a lot of areas of science and general human understanding. It’s folly for anyone to proclaim that we have fully uncovered all of the laws of reality much less filled in the blanks. We have made progress in our understanding but our journey is far from over.

I won’t suggest that Tegmark would agree with that, at least in degree. He is a scientist, to be sure. I do feel, however, that he is sincerely receptive to dialogue—even insistent on it—and that makes him the voice we need to move forward in our pursuit of understanding and the wonders, like AI, that knowledge will put at our doorstep.

If not here, the future is coming. After reading this book it’s a lot closer than I realized. The conversation Tegmark requests is both timely and necessary.

If you wish to read one book about the origins, the challenges and the potentials of artificial intelligence, I can’t imagine a better choice than this exhilarating work by Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading AI researcher. In this brilliant and wide-ranging new book, Tegmark draws on the insights of computer science, biology, cosmology, physics, human psychology and philosophy in reaching his conclusions -- which begin, but do not end, in his statement that the continuing development of AI “will offer amazing opportunities to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead.”

Tegmark spends a good amount of time in this book debunking the facile journalistic critiques of AI – that it will yield a race of robots intent on destroying humankind, that there is nothing that we can do about it – and he describes in detail both the vast possibilities and the serious dangers of AI. He contends that AI can be a force for good in the world but that its risks are real and require concerted action right now by the best minds on the planet.